French film makers throng to India, three big film projects in the pipeline

French film makers throng to India, three big film projects in the pipeline

An Indo-French co-production, the first of its kind, entitled La Nuit Bengali (The Bengali Night) with a provisional budget of Rs 2.40 crore will be filmed this autumn.

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MADHU JAIN

February 15, 1987

ISSUE DATE: February 15, 1987

UPDATED: January 15, 2014 17:15 IST

Carriere: the India affair

While the Raj nostalgia ebbs and British film makers recede from the shores of what was once the biggest jewel in their crown, the French cineastes have begun to sail in - with at least three big film projects in the pipeline.

An Indo-French co-production, the first of its kind, entitled La Nuit Bengali (The Bengali Night) with a provisional budget of Rs 2.40 crore will be filmed this autumn. And there are two more on the anvil according to Jerome Clement, director-general of the Centre National de la Cinematography, who was in India recently to attend the 11th International Film Festival.

Said he:"La Nuit Bengali will be the first co-production to be mounted under the Indo-French film protocol signed in 1985. It will be released jointly in India and France during the Festival of France in India next year. The second is on the life of painter, Amrita Sher-Gill, a project involving painter Vivan Sundaram, Sher-Gill's nephew, and film maker Kumar Shahani. The third is a film on the French in India as seen through the eyes of an Indian director."

The man who seems to loom large over the cinematic harvest of the Festival of India in France is the brilliant Jean-Claude Carriere, who has just completed the screenplay of Milan Kundera's latest novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Carriere is in India with theatre personality Peter Brook to prepare the English version of their critically-acclaimed play, the nine-hour Mahabharata as also an eight-hour film version of it.

Carriere is also, as he says himself, the "guru-script-writer" of La Nuit Bengali. In La Nuit Bengali, the director uses the love affair between a Frenchman and a young Bengali girl in the early part of this century, as a device to look at the French - just as the Raj films used India as a backdrop to study their own characters.

After the completion of La Nuit Bengali, Carriere plans to write a film for an Indian director. Said he: "For 15 years I have been trying to find a story and I think I have now found one. In the 18th century, young French soldiers were put on a boat for Pondicherry and then sent to the battlefield.

Many of them - some who had never even seen the ankles or arms of a woman - ran away and discovered India. It was almost like an American Western, this curious conjunction of the three civilisations of the British, the French and the Indians. It can be the origin of many stories and I would like to work with somebody like Mani Kaul."

Meanwhile, there is the Mahabharata, a never-ending story which Carriere says has changed his life.

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